Cultural keywords across communities of practice, languages and cultures: the glass-ceiling (effect)

This paper explores the meaning dynamics behind the conceptualization of glass ceiling (effect) as a general term and a cultural keyword (Williams 1976/1983), related word-formations, and the mechanism of re-conceptualization of its calque, loan translations and related compounds in Italian. Integrating the tools of corpus linguistics (Scott 2005) with insights from Štekauer’s (2005) Meaning Predictability Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff 1987, Lakoff/Johnson 1980, 1999) and Dobrovol’skij/Piirainen (2005), we focus on meaning descriptions (Wiegand 1992) in expository texts from the specialist press, research articles, dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopaedic entries (for English) and textbook sections (for Italian). As will be seen, glass ceiling finds its motivation in knowledge of material culture and aspects of artefacts. It activates the orientational metaphors UP – DOWN, the Career ICM (SUCCESSFUL IS UP; UNSUCCESSFUL IS DOWN; MAKING A CAREER IS UP), the metaphor DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION, and the concepts FORCE and CONTROL. However, while English glass-ceiling describes a (hidden) limit and a barrier to the advancement of women and other minorities, covering potential cultural keywords such as equal opportunities (for all) and social mobility in a fluid society, its Italian calque and loan translations show conceptual narrowing in that they appear to only address gender (IN)EQUALITY.